D. J. Sparr: Electric Bands
Innova

D. J. Sparr's probably the only composer who can claim to have had a piece inspired by a conversation between Run the Jewels' Killer Mike and talk show host Stephen Colbert (Meta444, for the record). That's hardly the only detail that distinguishes the Lubbock-based composer's material, however, as this eclectic sampling of his output clearly shows. The release features four contrasting works performed by different chamber-styled groupings, the composer credited with electronics on one piece and electric guitar on two others. Deemed by NPR in 2011 one of its music listeners' “favourite composers under forty,” Sparr has composed for and performed with many ensembles, including the London Symphony Orchestra and Eighth Blackbird.

Electric Bands opens arrestingly with I Can Hear Her Through the Thin Wall Singing, a five-movement setting inspired by Brooklyn poet Patrick Phillips' work and performed by soprano Kristina Bachrach with Sparr on guitar. She delivers the poet's texts, which concern love in its various forms, from romantic to platonic and familial, lustrously, and the contrast between her emotive outpourings and the metallic textures of the guitar makes for an ear-catching sixteen minutes. Her voice soars and swoops on the dramatic set-pieces “Elegy After Midnight” and “The Singing,” while the guitar intro to “Heaven” could pass for a Bowie nod, given how reminiscent it is of the opening in “Blackstar.” Offsetting the classical stateliness of Sparr's writing and her poised vocalizing is the warble, wah-wah, shudder, and slide of the guitar, the result suggesting what a Handel vocal piece might have sounded like had electric guitar existed during his life-time.

Performed by violinist Hajnal Kármán Pivnick and pianist Brianna Matzke with Sparr on electronics, Meta444 eschews vocal content for a single-movement exploration whose ululating unison patterns imbue the eight-minute work with a certain Middle Eastern quality, the composer perhaps wishing to suggest the possibility of reconciliation between different groupings, musical, ethnic, or otherwise. Of course, the idea applies to this performance in a literal sense in the way the acoustic sonorities of the violin and piano blend with the electronic elements.

In Irish Mythology, Avaloch refers to a magnificent paradise where residents dance the days away, but the word also refers to a real setting, the Avaloch Farm Music Institute in New Hampshire, whose apple orchards and walking paths invite visitors to breathe freely, too. Sparr's Avaloch string quartet, executed with conviction by the Momenta Quartet (for whom it was written), asks that the performers not only play conventionally but trigger pre-recorded music on personal playback devices. However experimental such a process might look on paper, in practice the fourteen-minute work impresses as one marked by lyricism and an earthy folk character that calls to mind Appalachian music as it wends its meandering way through bucolic terrain.

April 2019